Premature Presidents

Awoke this morning to find that leftist Ecuadorian presidential hopeful Rafael Correa had declared victory after taking 66% of the counted votes in his run-off with Álvaro Noboa. But this claim came after a bare 20% of cast ballots had been counted, continuing a worrying trend particularly in Latin American countries of premature declarations which have the potential to undermine often fragile democracies. In July of this year, after 25% of votes had been counted in the Mexican presidential elections, the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador held a lead of over 3.5% from the governing National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. It was not until 97.70% of polling stations had declared, nearly 24 hours after the first declarations had been given, that Calderón took the lead, going on to open up a margin of victory of 244000 in over 40 million votes cast. Both candidates had however already claimed victory on the basis of an earlier quick count and private exit polls all of which had lain within margins of error, and while Calderón has since been vindicated López Obrador has refused to concede, bringing Mexico City to a standstill for much of the past four months and threatening further instability.

A Correa victory in Ecuador is clearly the most likely outcome of yesterday's poll; at the time of writing with nearly half the votes counted Noboa trailed by a massive 35%. But this only heightens the dangers of an unexpected but decisive late Noboa surge; the Banana magnate is after all yet to concede defeat, and should he ultimately claim legitimate victory, we will again end up with two self-proclaimed presidents. As López Obrador and his supporters found, once victory has been declared accepting defeat is an incredibly bitter pill to swallow. Yet the temptations to declare premature victory are obvious, when street protests have had the power to bring down governments across Latin America (most recently that of Bolivia's Carlos Mesa in 2005). A failure to declare could lose a candidate the initiative, look ineffectual and appear to tacitly concede the race.

Part of the blame, therefore, has to lie with electoral systems that release partial results to the public and press long before all the votes have been considered. In elections with a clear winner, as appears to be the case in Ecuador, this has the benefit of swifting curtailing the political uncertainty which inevitably follows an election. This is obviously important in a country of endemic political turbulence where three presidents have been extra-constitutionally forced from power in the past decade, and Rafael Correa has indeed begun naming ministers and pronouncing policy. Moreover, poor communications can indeed render full counts in rural areas protracted affairs; in Peru's presidential election first round of April 9th Lourdes Flores Nano was not forced to concede defeat to Alan García Pérez for the final run-off spot behind Ollanta Humala until a full 24 days after Peruvians actually went to the polls. Yet in such closer contests, by obliging candidates to second guess the ultimate outcome, partial counts run the dangerous risk of prolonging the uncertainty long after all the full results are actually in. Announcing provisional results does little to further aid transparency so long as election monitors are given adequate oversight of counting procedures, and it perversely allows candidates such as López Obrador to spuriously paint the thwarting of their ambitions before the eyes of electorate as fundamental electoral fraud. In an ideal world candidates would not declare until victory truly was assured, but it is naive to expect politicians not to do so while partial results continue to be released. It thus falls to election officials to hold back from announcing provisional results, and strive harder still to minimise the time it takes for fully definitive results to come in.